Reeves, Mildred E., 1896-1973

Sometime around 1916 or 1917, the exact date isn’t clear, a woman in her early 20s from Washington, DC, named Mildred Reeves took a job in the office of Congressman Nicholas Longworth, an up-and-coming Republican legislator from Ohio. Within just two years or so, Reeves had gone from a minor role handling the mail to becoming one of Longworth’s chief aides, responsible for running his office—a position equivalent to today’s chief of staff. As a widely read Washington newspaper put it, Reeves was “yet another Washington girl who has made good.” In fact, by 1919 Reeves was one of a number of women serving in high-ranking jobs on Capitol Hill In 1923, when Longworth became Majority Leader, Reeves joined him in leadership. And in 1925, when Longworth became Speaker, Reeves made history, becoming the first woman to ever run the Speaker’s office. Mildred Reeves, a native Washingtonian, was born on July 15, 1896, to Frederick W. and Alice Alderman Reeves. After graduating from Roosevelt High School, Reeves cycled through a few jobs before landing as a stenographer in the office of Ohio’s Nick Longworth Notably, though, at about the same time that Reeves took the job handling Longworth’s correspondence, Jeannette Rankin of Montana won election to the House and was sworn into office in April 1917 as the first woman in Congress. Longworth became Majority Leader in 1923, and Mildred Reeves moved over to his leadership office, where she managed correspondence. The Washington Sunday Star ranked Reeves as one of the “indispensable specialists” who served Congress, noting that she was studying law in part to improve her familiarity with House procedure—undoubtedly, a requirement given that she oversaw the House Parliamentarians. And so it was that Reeves, after three years of night classes and summer sessions, all while leading the Speaker’s office, earned a juris doctorate from National University Law School (which later merged into the George Washington University School of Law). In August 1928, Reeves was one of 193 people (just 14 of whom were women) to pass the DC bar exam. And it was Reeves who took the phone call from the White House in April 1931 which broke the news to Capitol Hill of Longworth’s untimely death of pneumonia while on vacation in South Carolina. Reeves became the point person for the deluge of press calls, and at the instruction of Alice Longworth, made the arrangements to transport the Speaker’s body back to Cincinnati, helped to organize the memorial service there, and sat in the front pews with Alice and other family and friends. Later in 1931, her peers in the Women’s Bar Association elected her to the group’s executive committee. She took a job in what was then known as the Bureau of Internal Revenue (forerunner of the Internal Revenue Service), where she served as counsel in the office of the general accountant. But within two years, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic administration came to power, Reeves was one of about 50 attorneys (“most of us were Republicans”) who were summarily dismissed. “President Roosevelt launched his one and only economy program,” Reeves quipped about the fact that she was fired from her job even as FDR greatly expanded the size of the federal government. She subsequently went into private practice in Washington, joined a major law firm, and was admitted to practice before the federal Court of Claims, the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. At the 1936 Republican National Convention that nominated Kansas Governor Alf Landon as its presidential candidate, Reeves made national headlines again when she became the first woman to serve on the Republican platform committee A year after he defeated Taft for the GOP nomination, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made Reeves his first female judicial appointment, naming her to serve as a judge on the District of Columbia Municipal Court (now known as the Superior Court of the District of Columbia). In 1950s America, when expectations of domesticity contained the career aspirations of so many women, the appointment of a female judge made national news. At the end of her 10-year term in 1963 she retired. Retired and in her mid-60s, Mildred Reeves married Dennis Sherman, a native Ohioan, in Cincinnati on December 2, 1963. The newlyweds moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Dennis died a few years later. Reeves died of cancer on July 15, 1973, and was interred in a family plot at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington a few miles north of the Capitol. Her grave is but a short walk from that of Alice Longworth’s.